


the skeleton's daughter

by arbitrarily



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-22
Updated: 2011-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-22 22:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the smallfolk love tales of the predator and his prey; the smallfolk love to lie, for neither party can be found here. (two years later, jaime delivers a proposal of marriage to jeyne, the girl of the crag).</p>
            </blockquote>





	the skeleton's daughter

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through _A Feast for Crows_.

  
**1.**

The smallfolk say the girl bewitched the wolf.

When Jaime first heard it, he had laughed.

 _Boy’s more cock than wolf_ , he had said.  _All it takes is a pair of spread, shapely legs to tempt one of those, and rise they will to the occasion._

In the stories he heard as a child, it was always the wolf that tempted the girl. It was always the beast come for the maiden.

He cannot recall if it was his mother who told him these tales or Cersei. He thinks it does not matter.

He thinks had it been Cersei, both male and female would have been beasts, and in the end the monsters tricked each other.

 

 

 

 

 **2.**

 _I should slit your throat_ , she says when he steps into the hall -- her hall. A fire is lit in the hearth, but the heat does not stretch beyond her, her body in profile silhouetted against the flame.

She is still slight, but her voice carries, a sibilant hiss rusty with a similar neglect her home possesses.

Jaime smirks.  _Widowhood has made the girl a woman_ , he teases, and he takes another step forward. 

And then she -- Jeyne, The Wolf’s Widow -- surprises him.

She smiles, a cruel and terrible flash of her teeth; he doesn’t know whether to call her a wolf or a lion.

In this story: the girl is no girl but a pair of snapping jaws, hungry for her pound of flesh.

 

 

 

 

 **3.**

The last he saw of her, her grief was a near corporeal thing, weighing down her weak and slender frame as she rode from Riverrun. They sent her to the Crag. Or, no. He sent her to the Crag. She was sent to the Crag, sent back; he remains unsure if it is the events themselves that matter or if the engine driving behind them merits more consideration.

When he sees her again, it's at the Crag, the coast as much a part of the architecture as the ruined castle that sits against the shore. Everything along the Crag is grey: discolored, bleak, an inviting straight drop into the churning sea and rocks below as landscape for the Westerling seat. Winter had reached the castle here as well, but the sea still roiled, bitterly cold he knew, and the road they travel is marked more by ice than snow. 

Two long, short, merciless years have passed since he saw her last. He never thought of her. Jeyne Westerling was not a thing to think of. She married the wolf pup, and then he perished --  _his grave purchased with Jeyne's own cunt_ , he thought ruefully. She had loved the boy though, or so she said, and seeing the castle where the young King in the North had stormed -- empty, nothing here but rock and salt -- he can see easily why she willfully offered her own bed and body up against his siege. 

He has come to bring her a husband. Two years, and the war wears on, but the enemies shift same as the snowdrifts that crowd the roads clogged thick with the lost sparrows and the wayward knights, no sigils on their breasts. 

There’s a Tyrell who would have her, and they need that. The realm needs that. Jaime does not think he cares much of the realm nor its health, but he also cares not for another broken oath to attach to his name.

A Lannister always pays his debts, and two years ago he made a promise to her mother. 

 

 

 

 

 **4.**

In this story, it is always the beast come for the maiden.

The beast: a wolf, a man, a heavy body pressing a lighter one down, the sharp crisp blade of an axe, the unnoticed grind of familial manipulation, a broken oath, a broken bottom lip, the weight of a bronze crown on too small a head.

He finds her at the Crag, alone. Her household guard eyes him warily as he dismounts, more ghostly sentinel than threat to arms. In his pocket, he carries a letter with the Tyrells’ seal pressed against his chest, and when he asks she tells it true:

 _Mother is dead,_  and a better man and not a beast would be horrified at the defiant way she raises her chin, the way the entire keep suddenly reeks of revenge spent instead of unkempt desolation. There are dead flowers in the vase upon the old oak table, a cluster of dried petals and browned fallen leaves framing the Myrish vase, too urn-like in this tomb of a hall.

He forgets the letter in his pocket, his gold hand clumsy against a glass of cloudy red, as he smiles tightly to himself.

He thinks:

One letter difference between the brand kinslayer set against his own personal mantle: Kingslayer.

 

 

 

 

 **5.**

Jeyne is broken, same as the rock she sits upon.

Perhaps it is why she lets him break her a little more. That part is easy to tease out -- her part. Her part in any of this. The men come to the Crag, and Jeyne, Jeyne, little Jeyne, she takes them in.

She takes them in whole and then spits them out, spits them out the other side, the side of the hourglass where the sand thins to nothing, where there’s nothing left but empty glass or too much sand, towering high, filling begging mouths and open, disbelieving eyes.

She’s enough to make a man choke on little more than his own fate.

 _Witch of Westerling_ , the smallfolk call her now.

His left hand is a clumsy tool, but he can still bend it to his will. And maybe Jaime likes an insolent mouth because it reminds him of his own; maybe he likes a sinner who has no desire for remorse but rather understanding. Just as not all sins are created equally, the same can be said of murder.

 _Are we murderers?_  He had wondered it while he sipped his red and while she stained her teeth with the same, her goblet filled with the same cask of grape, and he almost trusted her then.

He derives no pleasure from her, but he selfishly offers it. And she takes it. She takes him in, two fingers, heavy and thick, and he has had no practice with this. She is wet, but she does not come. She watches him --  _a hawk, not a lion nor a wolf, a hawk, how many stories are there of the hawk?_  -- and her voice is a girl’s when she tells him she will not marry another.

 _It is good you came alone,_  she tells him, voice even and pulse steady, his fingers still curled inside her. It is his pulse that spikes, because he knows what she does not say.

 _She would have cast him from the rocks,_  he thinks, The Widow on the Rock.

He does not know which  _him_  he means -- the unwanted husband, or perhaps, himself.

 

 

 

 

 **6.**

She is sad, and Jaime is used to women -- a woman -- who cloak themselves in the brutal red of anger, not this muted grey of long-suffering grief and despair. 

It has mutated her though, this Jeyne. He is sure she was once lovely, once kind and once giving. Once the sort of creature a king can spy and think,  _I love her, I want her, I will risk it all -- for her, only her_ , and then dive off the side of the very cliff the Crag sits atop.

The waters lap against the stone, thick white foam that stains the rock, as though thirsty for more of the same. The waves beat noisily, and on the wind, Jaime thinks he can hear a single word.

 _her_.

He leaves on the morn. He will tell the Tyrells:  _there was no girl to be found._

There was no trick either; two monsters, no trick.

(The trick: he leaves. The trick: she does not keep him. The trick: she has yet to leap and meet the rocks that wait below).

He thinks they were meant to eat each other, a lion and the widow, one the other’s prey.

 

 

 

 

 **7.**

 _Are we murderers?_  he thought.

All he found with the word was a familiar tide of boredom. 

 

 

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
